


Drifting/Falling...

by reallysmallgiantrobot



Series: Crossroads [5]
Category: Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider Fourze, Kamen Rider Kuuga, Kamen Rider Kuuga - Crossroads (+50 years)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Future, Gen, M/M, Multi, Spoilers - Kamen Rider Fourze, Spoilers - Kamen Rider Kuuga, Spoilers - Nonspecific
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 16:12:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1989387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reallysmallgiantrobot/pseuds/reallysmallgiantrobot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Godai Yuusuke has left Earth with Gentarou and Nadeshiko on the former weapons platform XVII to try his hand at wandering the stars. But when they arrive at Godai's first alien world, they find that a new incarnation of the Crisis Empire is trying to conquer it! The Riders must band together and make new friends along the way if they hope to save the planet Angrov from the clutches of the DaiCrisis Empire and Godai from the monster inside him.</p><p> </p><p>A multi-part fic told in multiple limited third-person POVs, containing mild, off-hand, and largely nonspecific spoilers for more than a few Kamen Rider series and tangentally-related Ishinomori works.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act I - XVII, Space

**Nadeshiko  
** ”You’re worried about him.” Nadeshiko’s voice was quiet as she moved to stand beside Gentarou, placing a hand between his shoulderblades.  There was a knot of energy there; something not many would see but her eyes now weren’t the eyes she’d created decades ago to mimic the human form. 

“Hm?” Gentarou looked up, the familiar smile crossing his face, “Yeah.  A little.  I guess.”  He shrugged his shoulders and swatted a stray strand of his pompadoured hair out of his face, “He’s been doing better, but you know...”

Nadeshiko smiled a little herself, turning to the window of their friend and conveyance, XVII, to look at the blazing figure hunched on the far side of XVII’s solar collector panels. 

Her eyes—and, she imagined, Gentarou’s as well—watched Godai Yuusuke, subsumed underneath the light-absorbing armour of Kuuga, burning in the dead of space.  There was nothing out there to burn, no oxygen to catalyze the reaction, nothing but Yuusuke and the Amadam.

But to the eyes of something like herself, something comprised of pure cosmic energy, he was like the heart of a sun, sending out wave after wave of radiation that would warp anything which had not been touched by the Presenters as a way of furthering their interests of checking in on inhabited planets and seeing if they were yet ready.

“You should go out there if you’re worried about him,” she told Gentarou, “It’s not like you to hesitate to be there for a friend.”

Gentarou scratched the back of his head, looking a bit embarrassed. “I am worried about him, but right now it’s hard to know what to do, you know?  I’ve been through a _lot_ but...” he gave her one of his big smiles, a little burst of anxious laughter, “...I never lost someone I loved like that. You and Kengo… it was different. Ichijou’s not coming back and he knows it and it feels normal for him to be down about it.  Don’t know if I should be hovering around him or leaving him be.”

Nadeshiko rolled her eyes as she stepped through XVII’s window, trailing little silver sparkles in her wake, “Come on, Gen.  Worrying doesn’t help; action helps!”  She loved looking back on her time in a human-like body whenever she compared it to her life now, loved the freedom of being pure energy.  The sucking lack of oxygen would have destroyed the lungs of the human girl she’d meant to become and she took a strange, quiet pleasure in the memory of that limitation; it made her current freedom that much more intoxicating.  She dragged Gentarou—who was smiling his easy smile, always happy to be dragged along—through the window out onto the sleek black surface of the solar collection panel, trying not to laugh at the sensation of Kuuga’s cosmic flame (even if it were not exactly flame) making her visualized mass ripple before she adjusted her wavelengths to compensate for the tidal waves of radiation the man gave off without thinking.

“Hey, Godai!” she said, waving her arm wildly at the Ultimate Darkness, “You doing okay out here?”  There was no air in space, of course, nothing to vibrate; the three of them could talk just fine all the same along strange varieties of radiation bouncing off the raging firestorm Godai gave off.

“Yeah, man, you’ve been out here a real long time and we were starting to worry.”

There was a shift in Godai’s armour and the firestorm stilled itself as he turned to the pair of them, laboriously getting to his feet. “I’m alright, promise.”  He tilted his head a little, “Have I been out that long?  I think I lost track of time.”

“Space’ll do that,” Gentarou laughed, absently turning his head to watch a Nova roughly eight hundred times the size of Earth’s sun pass them by as XVII propelled itself through space at the subluminal speeds appropriate for being so close to inhabited planets, “No sun, no moon, no anything.  First time I was out here, I had XVII set me up with an alarm and just start dimming lights and stuff so I could sleep.”

“Marking time _is_ a pretty good function for sleep, I guess,” Godai remarked with a shrug, “I haven’t needed to, really.  Not for a while.  These days it seems like it would be all too easy to just stay asleep forever, like the Kuuga before me.”

Nadeshiko nudged Godai in the side with her elbow, “Well, we’ll just pop out and pull you in a bit more often, okay?  XVII’s batteries are so overcharged from you just hanging out and _burning_ that zhe’s just plain venting about half of it so you don’t melt the panels.”

Godai rubbed the back of his neck a little, “Sorry, I didn’t—“

She put her finger to the silvery mouthpiece of his armoured face, “Shush.  I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong but come on.  We’re nearing your _first new planet_!  Let’s get pumped!  Throw a party!  Break out Yuuki’s space champagne!”  She turned to Gentarou then, “And _you_ , let’s stop pussyfooting around!  He’s your _friend_!  Stop hanging back when you should be hanging _out_!”  Nadeshiko gave Gentarou a little shove to push the other cosmic energy being into Godai and laughed a little at the expression she could read on Godai’s armoured face.

Gentarou and Godai looked at the woman for a moment before the pair of them laughed and Gentarou pulled Godai and Nadeshiko in for a hug.  “I love you guys!”

“GENTAROU—“ boomed XVII’s voice over one of the radio signals the three of them could catch.

“Aw, I love you, too, XVII!  C’mere, you!” said Gentarou as he fell down on his face, arms spread out to hug the armoured weapon platform’s solar collection panel.

“THANK YOU, GENTAROU,” replied XVII as Nadeshiko began to notice that they’d dropped well below even the subluminal speeds they were cruising at in the vicinity of Gliese.  “BUT I DO NOT REQUEST ASSURANCES.  I SPEAK TO WARN.”

Nadeshiko knew what she was looking at before she even turned the image of her body around, as did Gentarou, who just gawped.  The both of them (as well as XVII and a few passing comets) felt Kuuga’s fists tighten, a habit he seemed to have picked up from all that time with Kotaro once his red, insectine eyes saw it.

A planet none of them had ever visited—the planet Kengo had gone to check out for the Presenters—was being bombarded by a monstrous craft in the all-too-familiar style of the Crisis Empire.

Nadeshiko cracked her knuckles and smirked.  “XVII?”

“YES, NADESHIKO?”

“Can you get us somewhere we can drop in without putting yourself in harm’s way?”

“YES, NADESHIKO,” replied the platform as it began charging up its not-inconsiderable weapon array along its underside, “WILL YOU REQUIRE SUPPORT?”

“Probably,” she allowed with a shrug, “But we’ll probably only _really_ need moral support.  The other stuff you hold off on until we call, okay?

“THANK YOU,” came XVII’s thundering reply.

Nadeshiko nodded sharply before grabbing Godai’s shoulder and turning him toward her, “Now, are you ready to fight some bad guys in space to protect a planet that probably hasn’t even figured out radio?”

It was readily apparent that she wasn’t accepting no for an answer.

 

 **Godai  
** Godai looked down at the ship as it loosed another rain of light on the planet below. Even from thousands of miles away, he could see the massive explosions the new Crisis Fortress’ weapons inflicted on the tiny blue-green planet below. Not earth, but did it matter really? People lived there.

People died there.

Next to him, Nadeshiko and Gentarou pulled their Drivers out of the cosmic energy stream and slapped them onto their waists. He had never asked how that worked, and honestly, it wasn’t any weirder than the Amadam that rested in his stomach and yet let itself be so readily summoned. He had to admit that he was a little relieved, because while he knew that neither of them really were human anymore and could stand the vacuum of space without transforming, watching them out in the darkness in nothing but normal clothes felt odd. It made him feel like he should drop his transformation, but that would most likely kill him.  Maybe.  It hadn’t killed Kotaro, after all, but he hoped he would never have to make the experiment.  He’d died by drowning a couple times and didn’t imagine death by void was any nicer.

Godai counted along with their belts’ countdown and felt the rush as the cosmic energy of the Fourze and Nadeshiko transformations which changed the pair of them into a bright white light and a glittering silver one before solidifying into their familiar armoured forms. Probably for his benefit as well, he had been thoroughly weirded out those first few days at how much time they spent as energy. It had felt unreal enough as it was, and having people around… it helped. Helped ground him.

Centering himself, Godai took a long breath (or something like one) and Kuuga let it out, along with an invisible cosmic firestorm. It was always an effort keeping the flames at bay these days, and looking at the devastation wrought by the ship below made it nearly impossible.

“I’m ready,” he said in the weird way they spoke out here in the darkness.

“Great!” exclaimed Gentarou, “Dibs on helping on the surface!” The smile did not show on the helmet, but Godai could feel it all the same. The excitement of seeing a new planet.  Making new friends.  Finding Kengo.

“Aw, so beating up the ship’s just for me and Koogs?” Nadeshiko teased.

“Going to do my best to help them weather that bombardment.” Gentarou checked his switches. “The moment the guns stop firing, I’ll be back with you.”

Godai smiled a little inside the helmet, looking at the ship and then at Nadeshiko, “I’m not as agile as Gentarou.  I’ll try not to get in your way.”

“I’d be more worried about keeping up if I were you,” Nadeshiko laughed as she turned into a beam of glittering silver light and rocketed toward the Fortress.

“Been awhile,” Gentarou muttered as Fourze’s rocket switch created a bright orange rocket on his arm and sent him hurtling toward the planet below. Though there was no air, space echoed with his cry of “Blast off!”

Godai waited a moment to make sure they were clear, then backed up a few step before leaping out into a darkness far less terrible than the one he carried inside him.

At least the ship was large enough that his hard-earned rider kick could not possibly miss.

There was a moment as he felt the terrible gravity of Kuuga—of the ultimate darkness—propelling him with a speed that threatened to shatter Godai’s awareness toward the heart of the fortress, where he once again felt the darkness of the Amadam’s hunger for battle clawing at him, where he felt a rush of anticipated pleasure of his foot landing at exactly the right place and triggering a firestorm which would turn the ship to ashes.

Again, he felt that urge to surrender.

He hoped Gentarou wasn’t lying about having seen the afterlife because he hoped that Ichijou would be proud of him for pulling himself out of the kick’s dread inertia.

 

 **Gentarou  
** The explosion as Kuuga hit the ship above him with the force of a small cosmic storm lit up Gentarou’s senses as he plummeted through the atmosphere. Planetfall was always a thrill, but right now he’d take the burning heat of atmospheric reentry over what was going on up in space.  Godai was his friend, and he needed him, but sometimes he was a little bit freaked out over the whole Ultimate Darkness deal.  Of course, that was why Godai needed him even more; you didn’t run out on your friends just because they sometimes scared the crap out of you.

It would just have been easier if he’d still been human and didn’t have to see exactly what was inside that black armour.

The clouds passed by in a blur of mist and explosions, and then the surface spread out below him like a forest fire.

It was bad.  Real bad.  The bombardment had set fire to the city below, and somewhere down there was Kengo.  Kengo and an untold number of other intelligent creatures, and the bombs kept falling.

Oh well, no time to hesitate.

The rocket tore at his limbs as he changed direction, crashing drill-first into one of the missiles, using the explosion for velocity to ram into the next one. At least they were large and slow, the cheap, old kind that you could throw away at a planet like this that didn’t even have a proper air defense.

It had one now.

Switching to Magnet state in midair wasn’t how he liked to do it, but it was the fastest and surest way to get as many of the missiles as possible. Of course this meant that now he had a small armada of missiles homing in on him, and maybe he should have thought this through beforehand because this was going to hurt.

There was just enough time to brace for impact.


	2. Act II - Angrov, Assault

**Kengo  
** The attack had been sudden but not unexpected.  When a world caught the interest of one spacefaring organization, it tended to catch the interest of at least a few more.  And if the Presenters were the ones doing the noticing, that’s when you got most of the more predacious ones.  He’d warned the couple of people he’d befriended over the course of his evaluation of the planet about most of the ones he’d helped fight.  Thankfully, they weren’t developed enough in a lot of ways to have access to cosmic energy and, therefore, to the Zodiarts’ power and if they had a Shocker, it wasn’t very far along.  It could have been some new Golgom cult and if they had their own Grongi, they were still asleep.

For a while there, he’d actually thought the place was just going to be an easy run; projected onto the surface by the Presenters as a scout, blend in with a little super-advanced technology and just see what life was like for their rich and poor and what their priorities were in the major states.  It didn’t take much; a few days in their sky-choking industry, a few more as a functionary for a head of state.  JK was better-suited to a lot of it by temperament but JK’s body wasn’t a cosmic construct like his was.  He sometimes wished he would’ve got around to demanding the Fourze driver back from Gentarou.  It was full of all kinds of things that would be useful when it came to doing the Presenters’ work... but it always stuck with Gentarou and the pair of them were connected not just by friendship, but by their mutual transcendence of physical form.  Kengo had never quite mastered the trick.  But since it tended to involve getting killed, he was in no great hurry to try it out.

He’d been working as a teacher for the first time since he’d been asked to be a guest lecturer at Seminin and while he could see why Gentarou found it so rewarding... well, it was frustrating to be asked by the course material to teach lies to the students, stories about how the world worked which were clearly false even by the strange chemical makeup of the planet’s ecosystem.  He might have let more actual knowledge and scientific methodology sneak in around the edges but that was to be expected when the Presenters sent an astrophysicist to a planet which had not yet realized that artificial satellites were possible, no matter if they thought they were desirable.

The western continent (at least from where he’d been placed) was stable enough; thriving economy in the midst of industrialization, with everything that had entailed on Earth.  The people on the southwestern continent were practicing a kind of bio-sculpting with the vegetable life which he was going to ask for special dispensation to study in depth once the Presenters had made their decision about whether or not the planet was ready for them.

He didn’t think they were likely to decide that it was.  But now some would-be conquerors were bombarding them from space—the DaiCrisis Empire, which had apparently won some of the infighting going on between most of the would-be conquerors in space in the decades since the Zangyak empire’s defeat—had forced the people to be aware that something was, indeed, out there.  Worse, they’d made it known that it probably wasn’t friendly.  The kind of effect that could have on a world’s development he didn’t like to consider.

They would, as did the Presenters and even Mitsuaki Gamou in the end, have to rely on the youth.

If they lived.

Another explosion rocked the thick stone building where he and his class were taking refuge.  Kengo put his hands on the backs of the quaking children whose chlorophyll-coloured skin was blanching toward yellow.  He looked like one of them, as far as they were concerned, and as was true on so many worlds, the presence of a calm adult did wonders.

And he was calm.  He was frightened, too, but he was also calm.  Years on different worlds that caught the Presenters’ interest led to these sorts of situations happening fairly often.  JK had once compared it to being a war correspondent, following it up with advice that maybe a man of Kengo’s advancing years—even with cosmic backup from the Presenters—should consider another line of work or possibly an early retirement to write his memoirs or a couple more textbooks.

“Alright, everyone just _keep your heads down_ ,” he said as calmly as he could, half a smile on his face, smiles being a big key to keeping people calm.  “This’ll all be o—“ another explosion, closer this time, cut him off.

“Okay, now everyone get under your desks,” said Kengo as calmly as he could manage, “We’re going to ride this out as best we can.”  He looked out the window, made of treated leaves, at the monstrous craft above with its insectine legs and demonic dinosaur face, as a gout of energy shot out of its mouth; it must have been very large and _very_ high up for the beam to take so long to make it to the surface.  And on top of that, it was shedding what looked like spores from this distance; probably drop-pods filled with invasion forces.

He looked back at the kids, into the single room that made up the school, and wished there was a basement or storm cellar or any sort of shelter to take them to.  Anything that wasn’t just telling them to hide under their desks.

And then the missile exploded.  Not on the ground, but in the air.

And he caught sight of a white streak against the bright blue sky and the Fortress jerking like an animal with a broken back above it.

“Gentarou,” he murmured with a smile.

“What’s that, teacher?” asked Ekirh, one of the quieter and more curious of his temporary students from under the sturdy stone of her desk.

Kengo smiled a bit wider as he scooted under the desk with the children, “I said ‘Gentarou’, children.  It’s the name of my best friend from a long, _long_ way away.” 

“Why are you thinking about him at a time like _this_?”

“Because he’s great at this sort of thing.”

Outside there was another explosion which made Kengo and the children all gasp.  Through the window, Kengo could see the white glow falling to the ground on the heels of what looked like a handful of missiles running straight into one another.

He’d seen Gentarou survive worse as Fourze but he had to wonder how many more times his friend could do it, cosmic energy being or not.  It was probably a stupid thought but the thought of losing that man and his big, confident grin for good always overrode his more rational facilities.

“How does someone get great at... at _this_?  When the great _dragon_ finally comes to eat the sun, we’re all—“

Kengo smiled and cut the boy off, “That’s no dragon, that’s just a machine.  A bigger machine than has ever existed here on Angrov.”

“Not the biggest there’s ever been, though,” came an excited voice from the door.

The children gaped at the strange white creature which was moving their desk out of the way.  “Sorry for being so abrupt but I saw a decent shelter a little ways away and—“ Kengo nodded at Fourze with a severe expression and the lot of them disappeared in a swirl of white light.

A few of the kids went almost brown with surprise when they all found themselves down in one of the gaslit mushroom chambers where livestock were bred.  Despite the flatness of Fourze’s mask Kengo could tell that Gentarou was smiling at him.  The two exchanged Gentarou’s customary handshake quickly before Gentarou drifted a couple feet off the ground, “You stay safe now.  There’s gonna be a whole lot more shaking but don’t worry,” Gentarou thumped his chest twice before making a sweeping gesture at the children, “Kamen Rider Fourze’s on the case!”  With that, he flew through the deep earthen walls of the chamber.

“Teacher, what _was_ that thing?  One of the spirits?”

“Nothing like that,” said Kengo with a smile, “That’s my best friend, the Kamen Rider.”

“What’s a Kamen Rider?”

 

 **Godai**  
Nadeshiko caught Kuuga as he made a fiery exit wound in the hull of the Crisis Fortress and with more effort than he would have imagined she needed, she swung him out of his almost-apocalyptic flying kick and back onto one of the now-exposed decks of the Fortress.  He felt the alien metal threaten to give when he landed and landed hard on one of the decks, felt the whole ship—larger than many of the cities he’d visited on his journeys around Earth—threaten to warp from the heat his armour generated.

He watched Nadeshiko blast her way into the heart of the craft, leaving a corkscrewing trail of smoke and glittering energy in her wake, knocking the Crisis henchmachines this way and that.  Kuuga took a single step forward and felt the whole of the craft vibrate with the force of it.  Nadeshiko had a plan; she’d said she was going for the power source to put a stop to the bombardment.  That meant...  well, that meant that he was probably meant to put a stop to the brains of the operation.  Godai hoped—and hoped fervently—that she thought this because there had been evils which had stopped cold at the sight of the Ultimate Darkness and so this might be accomplished without bloodshed.  He hoped that it was not how well she and all the other Riders knew of the capacity for violence the Amadam had awakened within him.

That she was not counting on the young man who, half a century ago, had fought another thing that looked like a young man to a mad, laughing standstill and who had let—his head swimming with pain and his fists bloodied and his bones repairing themselves with a horrible speed and his heart breaking—Ichijou help him finish the job.

So he stepped forward again, felt the flames wafting off his body growing into an inferno that blackened the decorations in the Fortress’ impressive hallways, felt the carpet catching fire under his feet, vaguely aware of the glowing, white- hot footsteps left in his wake.  Some of the soldiers tried to rush him but a wave of scalding air pushed them back.  It was how he liked it.  Back on Earth he and Kotaro had actually had to fight people, people better used to Riders; these new Crisis people either had not learned from their predecessor’s fight with Kotaro or

A frosty blast cut through the flames; at the end of the corridor stood a machine-man clearly meant to mimic Kotaro’s RX form.  Kuuga felt his shoulders slump involuntarily.  This new Crisis Empire had clearly decided they were ready to fight.  He held up his hands in a sign that he did not wish to fight, “Are you in charge here?”

“I am Nemesis Hopper of the DaiCrisis Empire, Rider worm!  For the glory of Empress Garonia the Second, I will have your head!”  By way of punctuating the sentiment, the false-RX threw what was probably a very impressive punch toward him.

Kuuga stepped to one side and gingerly grabbed the machine’s forearm with one hand, placing his other hand on Nemesis Hopper’s other bicep, holding the machine’s arms in place and stepping close enough that most kicks wouldn’t have the opportunity to do much damage to him.  “Are you in charge here, Nemesis Hopper?”

“I serve General Bisir.  He has commanded the death of all Riders!”

“Alright, then, Nemesis Hopper,” sighed Kuuga, “Take me to him.  I want to parley.”

The metal man seemed unsure how to proceed.  There was a little motion in the arm Kuuga was holding.  Kuuga released it and Nemesis Hopper pulled the released arm back as if calculating if attacking the Rider was a good idea.  Instead, the machine man extended a pair of manacles to Kuuga.  “You will come bent, that you might be broken,” Nemesis Hopper intoned.

“Alright,” assented Kuuga as, many levels below, he felt still more explosions rock the craft.

**Nadeshiko  
** Nadeshiko mule-kicked one of the helmeted figures behind her as she pulled a handful of wires out of the weapon’s flashy console in the underbelly of the fortress.  There were a lot of the helmeted figures lying around now and she imagined they had to be brainwashed, programmed, afraid of the consequences of failure, or some combination of those things to keep coming at her.  She remembered once sitting with old Hongo, more machine than man but with a passionate spirit that dwarfed most people a third his age, and listening to him talk about the poor brainwashed combatants Shocker made out of unsuspecting humans.  They didn’t want to be there, they didn’t know what they were doing; but what they were doing was destructive and you had to fight them.

With that in mind, Nadeshiko did her best to hit them as lightly as she could while still putting them down; the cosmic awareness which she’d come to view as her birthright let her see how energy flowed through their bodies much as the simplistic organ of her old human eyes let her see the way light reflected off of things, so it was largely a matter of disrupting that energy flow in one way or another.

What was hard to disrupt was the beam of energy leaping toward her from behind; apparently concern for the safety of this particular bunch of weapon control systems was not as great as the concern that Nadeshiko be eliminated.  A bit flattering, that.  She jumped out of the way, aware of the massive knotting and explosion of energy behind her as the blast hit a volatile bit of armament and annihilated the controls.  Turning, she saw that her assailant was…

“What _are_ you?” she asked the creature, which was in many ways mammalian, in others avian, but still had two extra sets of limbs and nine glowing eyes.  The question was, for someone working for the Presenters, quite rude; disgust at another creature’s body (potentially their entire species) just did not do but there was a feeling of deliberate manipulation and _pain_ in the way the creature’s energies flowed through it that made the remark feel somehow fitting.

The creature loosed another beam of energy from its ninth eye in the center of its forehead and rasped in a low, tik-tik-tiking voice, “I am Demon Beast Nokigoe, the shriek of your despair!”  One of its left hands reached up to preen its luxurious coat of fur as its razor-sharp beak clacked once in what was obviously a motion meant to impress.  Nadeshiko got the impression that Demon Beast Nokigoe thought they were quite attractive.  Might even have been considered so, but Nadeshiko only saw its major energy points filled with some external malice.  Oh, and the one behind its eyes was about to loose another blast.

Nadeshiko slipped into her silvery incorporeal form and spiraled around the blast as she moved in close to the creature, turned solid and elbow-dropped it in the center eye on its forehead.  Nokigoe howled and cursed and its beak dripped acidic saliva onto the ground before it whipped its head up and let loose an otherworldly cry that knocked Nadeshiko back into one wall, sending the knocked-out foot soldiers and misguided techs flying this way and that.

The Demon Beast stumbled forward, keeping up its fearsome howl, and Nadeshiko felt its intensity going beyond the physical, starting to tear the solidified cosmic energy that made up her body away from itself.  It felt as if it was made _exactly_ to dissipate cosmic energy.  Apparently word of her impatience for d-bags trying to conquer planets had got around.  If it weren’t for how much it hurt, she’d have been proud.

She smirked, determined, behind her Rider form’s mask before slipping backward through the wall, watching it bend toward her and start to buckle as she slipped away, a streak of sparkling silver light heading elsewhere in the Fortress’ bowels.

Apparently disabling the weapons was going to be a bit more complicated than at first it seemed.

“Hey, XVII?  Think you could give me a hand real quick?” she whispered to the empty air, knowing that she would be heard.

**Gentarou**  
It was good to see Kengo looking well.  Working with the Presenters and, on this planet, with kids did a lot of good for him.  The bolt of white light that was Fourze spiraled around a hundred-yard wide blast of sonic energy, before solidifying in its path, the rocket on his arm holding him in place in the beam’s path as he deflected it away with the shield switch, pouring every scrap of excess cosmic energy into it.  The air-splitting sound bounced off the shield away from the block of buildings it was aiming at and into an empty forest.  He hated the thought of all the trees and wildlife suffering but redirecting something that big was hard and there was…

God, there were just so _many_ weapons.  So many weapons, so many lives they could ruin, even if they didn’t hit a single person.  He’d pulled occasional all-nighters with his grandpa since he was old enough to read the sizes on grandpa’s ratchet set.  He knew how much damage a broken home could do.  A hiccup in his cosmic energy stream loaded the Beat switch into the Fourze Driver and the speaker on his leg thrummed to life, emitting a shriek which somewhat lessened the force of the sonic blast as he tilted the angle he was deflecting it to catch another hail of bombs and send them flying well off their trajectory; most of them even exploded midair; those that didn’t at least did their exploding far away. 

Of course, catching some of the worst of the weapons wasn’t exactly _stopping_ them.  But if it took Kotaro the better part of a year, he had to imagine it was going to take more than a few minutes for Godai and Nadeshiko to manage it.  He’d call in support, too, but his radar switch connected to the same part of Fourze that the shield was using and like heck he was gonna turn the shield off to get hold of XVII. 

What he wouldn’t do to see Ryusei blaze in as Meteor—near sixty and still kicking; Hongo had said so many nice things about him—right about now.  There were limits to what one man could do…

And Gentarou hated it.

But there were people down there.  A world of friends he’d not yet made, a world of people who didn’t know that they were friends with one another, who had probably not yet learned the universe’s capacity for kindness beyond the ugliness that came from the twisted ambition and misinformed hearts of warlords and devils.

There were always more friends to make.  He kept reminding himself as he swapped the Launcher switch into his right leg to distract another rain of missiles and the Gatling into his left leg to explode a few more bombs midair.

You made friends because knowing them taught you how to know yourself better, because kindness—he firmly believed—made everyone involved bigger, better people. 

A massive shadow momentarily blocked out the sun as one of the illustrations of this moved into position above him.  Behind his mask, he smiled: he was only one man (or, well, man-like mass of cosmic energy) but he wasn’t alone.

He had friends he could count on.

 

 **Ekirh  
** Ekirh had snuck away from her teacher and classmates.  It wasn’t hard, really; it was painfully dark in the mushroom chambers, away from the life-giving sun.  She was happy to admit it was safer, but even more than many of her classmates, she just _hated_ being out of the sun, quietly resented all the barriers between herself and the vast sky.

And today, danger be damned, it was a truly _glorious_ sky.  A massive metal insect-dragon-god with a gaping, flaming hole in its side, raining down death as if explosions were its spores and just above the city was that glowing white _thing_ , the Kamen Rider, redirected blasts of energy, drew the bombs toward itself, exploded missiles and more in a stunning display of power and acrobatics.  This strange white ball of energy from another world (there were other worlds!) spinning in place mid-air and letting out one blast or another out of its arms and legs.  It was trying hard and even with all its speed and power, bolts of light still vapourized sections of the familiar city.  Places where she knew people lived.  The shop where they sold the best candy.  The factory where her mother worked.

Oh, no.  Her _mother_.

The Kamen Rider had doubtless evacuated her, too.  She had to hold fast to that thought.

She was about to start worrying again as a new titan slipped into view; a metal man, dwarfed by the insect-thing, appeared in the sky from… from _above_ the sky.  Past another ceiling. 

Kengo hadn’t been joking or lying or trying to convert them to his weird foreign religion.  There was _more_ out there.

The titan attacked the dragon like a scene from one of the old poems his mother read to her, light along its back and limbs as it attacked the line of the insect-dragon’s rhythmically-moving legs, scraping the glowing points the underside used to drop is deadly spores on the ground below, using its bulk to block many of the worst weapons while the flying Kamen Rider, a streak of shining white light, deflected, distracted and destroyed much of the rain of death before it could further damage her home.

“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

The voice made Ekirh jump as Kengo emerged from the door to the stone building they’d been hiding under.  There was an easy smile on his face.

“Yeah,” she muttered as Kengo moved to stand next to her, looking up with her at the chaos.  She looked over at him for a second, “You’re… not from the eastern continent, are you?”

Her teacher smiled a secretive smile, shaking his head, “I’m not.”

“You’ve… you’ve seen it, haven’t you?  All the stuff you talk about?  The fields of stars past the sky?”

Kengo nodded.

The giant metal man kicked off from the insect-dragon and folded in on itself, becoming a massive cubic _thing_ with massive black insect wings.  It launched volleys of brightness into the side of the insect-dragon as it slid upward into the blue-white haze of the sky, becoming a pinprick as it retreated.  The bright white Kamen Rider kept moving and deflecting the now much-reduced hail of death.

“Why… why is the giant leaving the fight?”

“Zhe took a _lot_ of punishment there.  Advanced as zhe is, there’s only so much zhe can do.  There’s a lot of irreplaceable stuff onboard, data and artifacts the Presenters use to do a lot of good on a _lot_ of planets.  Even that much was probably too much for zir.

 “The Presenters?”

Kengo, suddenly serious, looked down at Ekirh.  He looked for a moment as if he was debating something before his whole body rippled and he changed into something _else_.  Two eyes of white with brown spots in front, the finest dark brown and grey leaves (grass?) on the top of his head and a thin coating along his jaw, his skin tinged almost berry-coloured.

Ekirh gasped as the new Kengo—the real Kengo, she understood, after the initial shock—met her gaze as well as he could with only two eyes.  “I’ve seen the way you look at the sky,” he said carefully, “Do you ever hear it calling?”

Ekirh, realizing she was seeing some truth of her instructor, swallowed her pride and the laughter she’d received growing up when she answered, simply, “ _Oh_ , yes.”

 

 **Nadeshiko  
** While dodging through the rooms in the Fortress’ underside, Nadeshiko learned two things:

First, these Crisis jerks kept everything needed to make more of those Demon Beast monsters on-hand. 

Second, she did _not_ want to be on the receiving end of Nokigoe’s shriek again.

The pair of them had been playing cat-and-also-cat for the past while and it had gone long past being old.  She barreled through another wall and slammed the Demon Beast’s beaked face into a bay of computers with a good rocket punch but she couldn’t be as rough as she’d want to be because, well, there were more Demon Beasts in production.

The Crisis military were in the midst of forcibly modifying one of their almost-human-looking people in what looked like a painful rebuilding of their bodies, all the little pools of energy throughout their body being filled with muck as their physical form was contorted by cruel machines like the ones which must have had made Nokigoe.  She kicked her way through one of the main power veins for the machines, releasing the eight poor creatures which had been connected (forcibly, from the look) to them.  Most of the people seemed to be right at the beginning of their transformation but one was in the final phase.  A part of her had a thought that maybe she should find a way to lock the final-phaser up, the poor thing had to be in a tremendous amount of pain with its energies all gummed up and only the pool inside the top of its head was free of the muck.  Better than Nokigoe’s, sure, but...

Nadeshiko tackled the final-phaser out of the way as Nokigoe’s shriek pulverized the delicate equipment which had held the poor creature in place.

Good riddance.

“You stay here,” whispered Nadeshiko as she put the forcibly-modified being behind a wall.  It turned its cloudy gaze to her, blinking slowly to try and get its bearings again.

“Wh—“ it muttered, still dazed as it pushed itself to its feet.

“Don’t worry,” she said, ‘winking’ through her helmet by turning off the light in one eye, “Kamen Rider Nadeshiko’s on the case!”  She engaged the rocket switch again and shot ‘round the corner away from the dazed creature and drove her knee at barely-subsonic speeds into Nokigoe’s stomach before bringing the rocket around to punch the nasty thing in the side of the head, knocking them into another wall.


	3. Act III - Bisir's Throne Room

**Godai**  
General Bisir was an impressive sight, nine feet tall if he was an inch and clad in heavy chromed armour and an impressive cape, under which Godai could just make out a body not quite used to standing upright, pale scaly skin peered out from under his chromed mask of office and one clawed hand rested on the hilt of a sword which, if the stories Kotaro told of one of the previous generals were true, was far from ornamental. 

“So _this_ is part of the Rider trash which has dirtied my Fortress with its unclean presence,” spat the General as its unreadable red eyes scanned over Godai’s armoured form. 

Godai shrugged his shoulders, the motion making the manacles on his wrists rattle a little, “I suppose I am.”

He felt the General’s gaze move over him and saw his mouth tighten.

“A black-armoured Rider is known to us, but you are not the ‘Minami Kotaro’, are you?”

“No,” Godai replied, tilting his head to one side, “But he’s a friend of mine.  I’m Godai Yuusuke; my armour’s called Kuuga.”

The General stared at him, silently, for a moment.  There was no sound but the quiet rattle of the chains on Godai and Nemesis Hopper’s low, mechanical whirring sounds.  With a fluid motion which took Godai by surprise, the General drew the sword and swung it at Godai, who flinched and looked away.

The General stopped the blade a centimeter from Kuuga’s light-absorbing carapace and pulled it back, curious, “Why do you not stop the blade?  Have you come to surrender yourself to the great DaiCrisis Empire?  Have you come to _die_ , Rider?”

Godai shook his head, “No.  I... I’m not sure I even _can_.   I just came to talk because it seemed like the best thing to do.”

“Then why is there another piece of Rider filth ruining my weapons systems?”

“Because you’re hurting people and she really enjoys smashing up weapons systems that are hurting people.  We figured it might take a while to get you to stop on your own.  We didn’t want you to hurt any more people while I was convincing you.”

The General stared at Godai, shocked.  “You think that _you_ , a Rider, the _enemy_ of the DaiCrisis Empire, are going to convince me not to fight?”

Godai pondered his answer for a moment before simply answering, “Yes.”

The Fortress shook as, outside, XVII slammed into the underside of the Fortress.

The General, once he regained his composure, gestured with his chin to Nemesis Hopper, who blasted Kuuga with a blast of searing cold.  Kuuga let out a short cry of pain and dropped to one knee.  Apparently pleased by the effect of his soldier’s weapons on the Rider, gestured to Godai.  “Very well.  ‘Convince’ me, Rider.”

Godai shivered a little and gestured a little with his hands, searching for a thing to say.

“Just _stop_ ,” was the first thing he could come up with, a request which made the General let out some barking laughter.

“I _do_ hope that is not the limit of your persuasive powers, Godai Yuusuke.”

He regretted giving his full name then.  Hearing it pronounced as a mockery by this creature gave him a pang.  Ichijou had called him that.  Called him that less than a year ago, all white hair and creased, rice paper skin and stroked his face.

Godai let out a slow breath, even though Kuuga didn’t need to breathe.  One of those things that reminded him he was still human on some level.  Something to steady him.  He took a breath.

“This—all of this—will never do what it is you want it to,” Godai said, making a vague gesture around the ship with his manacled arms.  “Conquest, violence, it... anything good that comes out of it will only ever be on accident.  You have to know that, right?  If you’re _very_ lucky, you manage to keep yourself in power through your lifetime and then afterward, ev—“

A gesture from the General instructed Nemesis Hopper to land a fist in Kuuga’s stomach hard enough to bend him double.  It rather surprised Godai to note that it actually hurt.  They’d made Nemesis Hopper well.

Looking at the pale metallic sheen of the thing, he hoped fervently that he wouldn’t have to fight it.  But Bisir seemed intent on that solution.

Godai let out a low coughing sound before righting himself.  “You’re not interested in listening?” he asked the General.

“Not to that sort of claptrap, no,” Bisir replied, “We are creatures of war, Godai Yuusuke.  We do not speak like mewling intellectuals and quaking pacifists.”

There was a moment where he wanted to agree.  Where he wanted to change his words into something else, to correct the general.  Things like Kotaro and himself were not creatures of war.  None of the Riders were, but they were different.  Most of the Riders stood between war and its victims, threw wrenches in the machinery of wars by making it harder and harder for them to happen in any traditional sense.  But then there was Kotaro and Yuusuke.  He felt the shackles glowing red-hot around his light-absorbing arms but could not feel the heat wafting up toward his face.

He and Kotaro were not creatures of war, they were creatures of domination.  Creatures of slaughter.  Kotaro, no, Black Sun existed to place his foot on the throat of the world and force it to become some cruel parody of itself, to learn to breathe sludge and bathe in acid or die trying, to be a god.  Kuuga was something less grand and much simpler.  Kuuga existed to wipe the world clean then scatter the ashes before solar winds carried it to a new world, burnt away its host and the whole ugly process started anew.

Godai stilled Kuuga’s flame and turned to Bisir again, “I am neither of those things, General.  I only made it to my second year of college before the road called to me and I promise you, I’ve done enough violence in my life that I don’t know how to relate to people who haven’t.” He waited a moment to see if he would be struck again.  When he wasn’t, he continued.

“I’m just saying that I come from a world where people keep doing what you’re trying to do and even if it works for _some_ people, it won’t work for all of them.  I come from a world rich enough that your people wanted to take it and despite that, our histories are all about wiping out people who were in their way.”

 

 **Fourze**  
On the ground, a small child screams as the shadow of a bomb falls toward him.  His parents are scrambling back toward him to try and shield the boy with their too-thin vegetable matter. 

There is a dizzying flash of white around them before an unfamiliar figure gives them a thumbs-up with one hand while a net—apparently out of nowhere—holds the bomb in place before tossing it back into the sky where it explodes in the midst of a few other falling bombs, setting of a frightful—but harmless—calamity of explosions.

 

 **Godai**  
“My species is young,” Godai admits, “We have a few exceptional people who’ve visited the stars and a few more who can afford to sightsee there but things like this fortress are still a marvel to us.  And with that marvel, what have you done?  Devoured the resources of so many worlds and for what?  To force more people to conquer more worlds for you so you’ll have enough people and resources to conquer _more_ worlds?” 

Nemesis Hopper’s knee slammed into Kuuga’s stomach.

**Kanda  
** In the bowels of the ship, Nokigoe’s ninth eye seemed to have repaired itself and a beam of energy was cutting through another bay of weapon systems, sending up another shower of sparks to pass through Nadeshiko’s sparkling silver form before it let out another of its screams which dissipated her energy form against the floor of the weapons-engineering level.  She might have screamed as the energy-disrupting shriek tore through her.  Nokigoe was preening as he moved toward one of the still-operational panels, doubtless to report its victory over the silver Rider.

Kanda waited a moment for the silver girl to reappear.

She didn’t.

Kanda was still learning how to use the body the DaiCrisis Empire had made out of her once-soft flesh.  Her eyes were so very not her own, all massive and red and segmented.  Her arms were covered in an insectine ceramic chitin, her hands tapered off into cruel diamond-hard talons, her mouth filled with needle-like teeth of unfamiliar sharpness, and her muscles fair creaked with an unfamiliar hydraulic strength.

The glittering silvery girl, all punches and good-natured winking, had freed her from the machine which was trying to steal her life from her to serve those who had reduced her homeworld to rubble. 

Now she was gone.

Kanda leapt onto Nokigoe’s back and started tearing into the Demon Beast with everything she had.

 

 **Godai**  
“I told you I wouldn’t hear any more of this simpering nonsense, Godai Yuusuke,” sighed the General.  “Fatalistic philosophizing is very good for politicians but I am the head of an invasion force.”  His pale, scaled face broke into a grin.  Godai could see he was enjoying himself.

He hated the General a little for having fun, for treating this as if it were anything but an attempt to save the lives of the people on the ship.  They, like the General, were cogs in a machine.  But unlike cogs, they could change.  They could stop. 

And he knew how much the Amadam, with its infinite potential for violence, wanted him to let go.  To just this once let it take the wheel.  Just embrace how bleak the world looked without Ichijou and

“My husband is dead,” said Godai, taking a long breath afterward as the Amadam repaired the damage that last blow from Nemesis Hopper had threatened to do him and to the Amadam itself.  “Unlike all the people you’ve probably killed already, he got to see the end of his days.  I found him a good hospital and they kept asking me if I was his grandson.”  He laughed a little and the General watched him as if he were a madman.

Nemesis Hopper went to strike another blow but Kuuga caught the machine’s wrist with the glowing shackles around his wrists.

“I kept trying to explain but after a while, it just stopped.  The nurses had all told one another.  The head nurse had been a nursing student when I was just starting out, working under Mr. Ichijou’s mother, rest her soul.  She’s retiring now.  She let me cry on her shoulders when Ichijou died and had seen me back then when Daguva hurt… just hurt _everyone_.  Just like you.  Because he could.”

Kuuga twisted his wrists and grabbed hold of Nemesis Hopper’s forearm and turned the red gaze of Kuuga’s faceplate toward the machine, staring into the robot’s own massive red eyes.

“She brought me some food from a nearby restaurant and took me to the worst ramen stand I’ve ever been to and we drank cheap liquour all night until my friends all arrived to check on me.  And maybe the people you’re killing down there have friends.  But you’re trying to kill them, too.  And none of them will be able to smile for a long time, even if you turn around right now.”

 

 **Kengo**  
Kengo held his hand out to Kamen Rider Fourze, “We both know you can make a new one out of cosmic energy, Gentarou.  Just hand it over.  Fourze’s not just for Earth anymore.”

The white figure regarded Kengo for a moment before slumping theatrically as if conceding a point.  It took the shimmering blue buckle from its belt and transformed into another of Kengo's strange berry-coloured people.  He turned to Ekirh with a grin. 

“So you’re Kengo’s star pupil, huh?”

Ekirh just nodded dumbly.  The sight of two aliens in one day (especially on _this_ day) was making her head spin.

“Actually, she’s pretty terrible in most classes,” said Kengo with an easy smile, “Mostly because she spends most of her time looking out the window and daydreaming.”

The thing which was Fourze—Gentarou?—laughed and held the belt buckle out to her and gave her a massive grin.  “You take care of the Fourze driver for me, okay?  It’s one of my best friends.”

 

 **Godai**  
“Fool!” spat Bisir, “Do you only speak in sentimental twaddle?  I thought the Riders were _warriors_ , not cowards.”

Kuuga laughed a little, holding Nemesis Hopper’s gaze, not turning toward the General, “That’s where your entire philosophy is wrong.  You built us up to be like you because the idea that someone who wanted _anything_ but to fight again could so thoroughly crush the Crisis Empire is some sort of blow to your collective ego.  But Kotaro?  All he wants is for the world to be safe enough that he’ll never have to lift his hand again.  We’re all like that.”

Nemesis Hopper moved to attack again, to knee Kuuga in the stomach; Godai stepped closer to the machine, speaking directly to it, the General apparently forgotten.

“So many of us give up the power when the danger is past.  Those of us who don’t do it so that all the new heroes can be given the chances we don’t know how to take, so that all those other Riders can go back to wandering or exploring or to school or to finally get the therapy they need or raise families or write books or _anything_ that isn’t fighting people who just want to throw more intelligents into the emptiness of their conquest.”

He felt something inside the machine becoming conflicted.  Bisir was standing up from his throne and slowly readying his sword to strike.

“Do you understand, Nemesis Hopper?  We’re _all_ cowards.  We’d all love to do _anything_ else: to explore the stars or make friends or open restaurants or dance!  I just wanted to get to know my home planet and love my workaholic husband who wanted more than anything for his job to be unnecessary because people would just understand that it’s not about _domination_ , it’s about _compassion_.”

 

 **Nadeshiko**  
Outside the Fortress, Nadeshiko finally managed to pull herself back together—that Nokigoe packed a hell of a punch.  She was about to rocket back in when she saw that Gentarou wasn’t alone; the Astro Switches were firing off a bit more inexpertly and they weren’t coming from the white light that was streaking this way and that but from an awkward blue-green figure being dragged along by the all-too familiar rocket switch, a figure which was shooting wild into the trickle of weapons which were still managing to fire.

They were still gonna be causing damage if Gentarou was doing some on-the-job training with another Inazuman-to-be.  But, well, Inazuman and the rest of the Youth League had saved the world more than once so she figured she’d best leave him to it.

Just before she slid her silver energy form back into the DaiCrisis Fortress, she heard Gentarou’s voice bubbling up from below.

“Good!  Just remember to trust the Radar switch, it won’t lead you wrong.”

“But what if I mess up? “

“Then you count on your friends.”

 

 **Nemesis Hopper**  
“Why are you saying this to me?” whispered Nemesis Hopper.

“Because you’ve been tied to the Riders, Nemesis Hopper.  You were constructed because of us and built to counter us.  You look like Kotaro and you have power enough that you could hurt me and because I’m so tired of fighting and don’t want my first memory of meeting someone above an alien planet to be marred by me having to hurt anyone.  I want you to turn away from Bisir and the DaiCrisis Empire and be my _friend_ and we’ll go and meet the people down there and we won’t have to feel guilty or afraid o—“

Bisir’s blade emerged from Kuuga’s chest, cutting Godai Yuusuke’s lungs as it cut off his words.  Instead of the gush of blood Nemesis Hopper’s logic dictated should follow, there was only a rush of heat

Kuuga slumped against Nemesis Hopper and seemed to go out, its red eyes gone black.

“I thought you were going to hear him out,” said Nemesis Hopper, its subroutines warping around something in the deactivated Rider’s voice which did not seem as if it would be resolved easily.  There was less to do now that the Rider was gone so Nemesis Hopper poured more of its processing power into finding, categorizing, quarantining and deleting the foreign thing which the Rider seemed to have attached to his ego-process.

The General slumped back into his throne, “I was.  Until he bored me.  I thought a Rider in surrender would be more…” Bisir made a vague gesture as if trying to pick a word out of the air, a common tic when he was thinking, one Nemesis Hopper knew well.

“Impressive, General?”

The General nodded approvingly, “Yes.  More _impressive_.  But instead…” Bisir laughed a little, “But one Rider is gone, so let us turn to the other.  Has Nokigoe finished the other Rider yet?”

“I have not received such a report, General,” replied the machine.

“Then help it, won’t you?

Nemesis Hopper bowed and walked out of Bisir’s throne room, pausing for a moment to pass its eye over the fallen Rider.  “Shall I dispose of the Rider’s body on the way, General?” the machine asked carefully.

“No, Nemesis Hopper,” replied the General, smiling to himself as he knelt down, sword in hand, to inspect the Rider’s black-eyed corpse, “I think I’ll take a few moments to decide what I want to do with my new trophy.”

Nemesis Hopper inclined its head, “As you wish, General,” and moved toward the lower decks.

It surprised itself, as it moved to the elevator to those lower decks, by wondering if it would do what it had been told and help Nokigoe.

A few more computational resources went to trying to resolve the bizarre knot Godai Yuusuke’s words had placed in it.


	4. Act IV - The Darkness Wakes

**Ekirh**  
She was _flying_.

Sure, it was flying into a warzone filled with explosive bombs, beams of burning light and deadly sound but at the same time, she was flying and it was the most amazing sensation Ekirh had ever felt.  Gentarou, returning to his appearance as Fourze, was flying on a trail of light behind her.  Somehow that was even more amazing because, as he’d explained it during the flight back to the battle while some of the nastier weapons blinked offline, he was like one of the spirits (if he wasn’t literally one of them come to save them all from the sun-eater); not from Angrov but somewhere else where this sort of thing just _happened_. 

And she’d been chosen by the spirits to help save the world.

“N and S switches, outside!” came Gentarou’s voice and with a little hiccup, she felt the Rocket and Radar switches disappear.  Gentarou caught her before she could fall too far and she loaded the switches in as he told her; there was a ripple of power and she felt herself transformed, her eyes suddenly seeing a whole new spectrum of the world as two cannons appeared on her shoulders.

“What do I do?” shouted Ekirh against the sounds of explosions and whistling projectiles coming toward the pair of them.

“Just trust yourself, Ekirh; Magnet States is all about metal relates to other metal, friend or foe depending on how alike they are.”

“Metal like in those—“ she pointed to some of the projectiles that were almost on them.

“Yup!”

Two blasts of bright light exploded from the cannons on her shoulders and one of the projectiles pushed up away from them as more of them were dragged toward it and they exploded gloriously.  She swapped back in the Rocket and Winch switches and rocketed out of Gentarou’s arms, getting the winch around one of the missiles and tossing it up into the source of a bolt of light aimed at the big museum on the edge of town as she made a flailing kick with the Pen module, tossing a massive black streak of impervious “ink” into the blast’s path.

“I don’t know what Kengo’s talking about,” laughed Fourze, who’d stopped switching beyond his own Rocket switch and the Drill on his left leg, throwing himself into some of the projectiles and leaving Ekirh to clean up the worst of it.

“What do you mean?” she called back, wondering how he could just talk but she needed to shout; must have been a spirit thing.

“He said you weren’t a good student,” laughed Gentarou as he kicked another of the falling bombs into a missile, “but I know from good students and you seem pretty good to me!”

 

 **Kanda  
** Kanda awoke to the sound of quiet, appreciative laughter and a silver hand pulling her to her feet.

“Whuh?” mumbled Kanda, shaking her head to try and stop the echoing whine in her ears.

“Looks like you got Nokigoe.  I should introduce you to my friends Ryou, Shin and Daisuke ‘cause I think you could teach them a thing or two.” 

Kanda rubbed her head and looked around the chamber; there was a blackened starburst not far from it.  It meant something but—

The memory came back all at once.  The feeling of Nokigoe’s skin tearing under her claws, of its acidic beak stabbing into her shoulder, of the feeling of rage at the pain and.

The silver girl held Kanda as she vomited up a load of… of whatever it was they’d been giving her for food while she was being transformed.  She blinked her massive red eyes and looked at the silver girl.  “I… I didn’t—“

The silver girl watched her for a moment before turning into an altogether smaller girl with skin instead of armour.  “I’m Nadeshiko,” she said, “it’s gonna be okay.  You just stood too close to her when she exploded.”

“Was… why did she _explode_?”

Nadeshiko shrugged a little before gesturing over her shoulder to some of the computers with a little smile, “Look, I’m gonna wreck the hell outta everything on this level.  Think I could get your help and maybe we can send all these nice people back to their homes?”

Kanda was about to respond in the affirmative when they heard a heavy metal footfall behind them.  Both of them turned toward the source.  It was Bisir’s lackey, the Nemesis Hopper.

Kanda dropped into a fighting crouch as a burst of silver-blue light beside her announced the return of Nadeshiko’s silver form.

Nemesis Hopper put out its hands in a gesture of… if not supplication, then of _something_.

“Please,” came its mechanical voice, “I…”

It paused for a moment.

“I think I have been wrong.  Perhaps the three of us, we could—“

The machine was cut off by a sudden massive concussion which rocked the Fortress like a strong wave against the side of a ship.

Nemesis Hopper had led the invasion force which took Kanda’s home and saw her turned into livestock for the Empress’ modified army.  The sudden concussion had knocked the machine off-balance. 

Before she knew what she was doing, Kanda leapt onto it with a howl of rage and started tearing at its metal “flesh”.

 

 **Kuuga**  
There is a hole in  
everything

Cold metal inside the dark  
ice spreading like a pandemic  
inside

Metal removed.

Amadam stirs

The hole  
grows

Kuuga felt its lungs inflating again, resuming their vestigial habit of inflating and deflating under the carapace and its sheenless malice.  Kuuga felt its heart beating again, commanded by the drumbeat of the Amadam.  Kuuga felt its muscles resuming motion as the bones inside its torso knit themselves back together.  Kuuga felt itself ready again.

It pushed itself up.  The thing which had struck it down was speaking and Kuuga could see the halo of emotions around the thing’s head.  Kuuga saw it reach for its weapon.

Kuuga extended its arm.

Its arm’s movement was hampered by hard things around its forearms.  The thing swung a sword at Kuuga and the sword’s blade turned into molten metal before it could touch Kuuga.  The metal heated to metal then to gas and then the gaseous atoms broke into their component parts.

Kuuga broke the chain connecting the things around its forearms.

The talking thing was ablaze and soon the whole room was.  Decorations turned to ash.  The thing’s garments turned to ash.  The throne it sat on turned to ash.  The things around Kuuga’s forearms turned to ash.  The burning talking thing ran from the room through a hidden door in the back of it.

The door burned.

Kuuga took a thunderous step forward and the whole world of the Fortress shook.

 

 **Nadeshiko**  
She should have pulled Kanda directly off of Nemesis Hopper; it had been just about to offer help to them and now Kanda was working on flaying its metal hide.

She would have done so and some part of her kept clamouring for her to _do_ so but her senses had fixed themselves on the cataclysm on one of the upper levels.  There was no question what it was.  Throughout the whole of the Fortress, she could see the intelligences on the ship, all their minds glowing with constant thought; even the things with muck where energy should be still had something in them propelling them, making them alive.

And then there was the thing that was Godai.

Or inside him.

Nadeshiko grabbed Kanda and pulled her off Nemesis Hopper.  “Can you turn off the bombardment, metal man?” she whispered, eyes still fixed on the burning dark on the upper levels.

Nemesis Hopper half-sat up, bending its manifolds back into place as best it could out of some mechanical sense of modesty.  “I can.”

Nadeshiko nodded “Good.  Get on it.”  Nemesis Hopper fair sprinted away from the scene.  She put Kanda down.

“Do you know what that _monster_ did t—“ started Kanda before Nadeshiko cut her off.

“I don’t,” she shifted into her energy form, “We’ll talk about it later, I swear to you, but first I need a _tremendous_ favour of you.”

The monstrous woman narrowed her massive red eyes at Nadeshiko.  “What’s that?”

“I need you to find a way to convince everyone who _will_ get onto a lifepod or whatever they have here to do so _right the hell now_.”

Kanda sneered “Why?  If something’s going to happen to the ship, they all deserve whatever’s coming.“

“Maybe they deserve a lot,” Nadeshiko assented with a shrug, “but they don’t deserve this.”

Kanda found this hard to believe.  “Because you saved me,” she rasped, “ _Only_ because you saved me.”

Nadeshiko nodded.  It’d have to do.

 

 **Ekirh  
** She let out a cheer when the rain of death finally stopped, like a spigot being turned.  She let herself drift to the ground and prepared to remove the Fourze Driver, turning toward Gentarou with a beginning of some words of thanks. 

But Gentarou was nowhere to be seen.

Until she looked up, where Gentarou hung in the air, staring up at the metal dragon.  She called up to him but nothing seemed to grab him until one of the switches started beeping at her.  It took a couple seconds to swap the Shield switch with the Radar switch on her arm and activate it and suddenly her vision was filled with the sight of Kengo, kneeling on the ground in front of the school.

“Good, there you are,” he said, looking relieved, “I’ve been trying to get through to Gentarou but he’s not responding.  Could you get up there?”

“Sure thing,” she replied as she activated the Rocket switch and leapt into the air toward the glowing white light in the sky, “Everything okay?”

“No clue.  I’m getting some weird readings and I just want to make sure it’s not disrupting his cohesion.”

“His—“

“Don’t worry about that now.  Just see if you can snap him out of it.”

Ekirh nodded and swapped the Radar out for the Gyro switch so she could hover in the air in front of the man.  She deactivated the Rocket and waved her hand in front of his face.  “Gentarou?  Are you—?“

The man started and jumped back a few feet before shaking his head to clear it.  “Ekirh, can you pass me the Radar switch?”

“Can’t you just…” another question she left unasked, the switch appearing in her hand from somewhere in the Fourze suit.

“No.  They’re attached to the Fourze Driver,” he said, plugging the switch into his copy of the Driver, “Kengo’s dad made it and he refined the switches.  They’re _connected_.  I’m only borrowing.”

“Gentarou, _finally_.  Are you—“

“Sorry, Kengo, but can you verify what I’m seeing here?”  He turned the Radar’s dish toward the metal dragon and Ekirh wondered what it was that she was missing.  For a moment, she thought it was the little spores flying directly out from the sides of the craft but they didn’t seem to have any real designs on causing trouble (at least not immediately).

Then she saw it.  Maybe it was just that massive, maybe it was something in the way the Fourze suit interacted with her eyes, but she saw something moving near the neck of the massive dragon-thing, something turning a massive chunk of the neck a blackness darker than anything she’d ever seen, a darkness that seemed to draw her mind toward it, a darkness of aimless, malefic hunger.

“What is…”

Kengo’s voice cut through the sucking white noise of the growing darkness, “I’m on my way.  I’ll get XVII on moving the thing but I don’t know if zhe’s strong enough to pull the Fortress out of Angrov’s gravitational pull.”

Gentarou nodded sharply, “Then we’ll get in and turn that ship around.”  He turned to Ekirh then.

“What do you say, Ekirh?  Wanna save the day and maybe a few of our friends along the way?”

She looked at the blackness—it was not merely “darkness”—and shuddered.  But the thought of it touching down on her home planet, which it surely must have been planning to do, gave her the stone she needed.  Or at least something that passed for it.  She mimicked Gentarou’s sharp nod and the pair of them took off for the Fortress.

 

 **Nadeshiko  
** The warning klaxons were more than welcome and it was surprising how quickly martial discipline ran out once word got out that the General had been rushed down to the medical bay (almost certainly not the one where she’d found Kanda) and was probably one of the torrent of evacuees-to-be.

Kanda followed after her, helping cement the general low-level panic by wrestling the Demon Beast Commanders who didn’t see fit to listen to the alarms to the ground where Nadeshiko would pass them off to evacuating crewpeople, who would usually explain about the burning darkness at the fore of the ship in a way that would get the things to listen to them.

“What’s the story?” came Gentarou’s voice as he passed through a wall, out of his Fourze form.

“Seems the General stabbed Godai and…” Nadeshiko made a forceful gesture toward the waves of intense heat and the darkness she knew Gentarou could also see, “… _that_ happened.”

“Oh, no.  Godai’s…  I mean, he wasn’t…”

Nadeshiko nodded a little, putting a careful hand between his shoulderblades, “I know.  He’s been close for a while now.  Do we have a plan?”

“Kengo’s gonna—“ came a voice from behind them as a new blue-green Fourze stepped into the corridor.  Her helmet's eyes stuck on Kanda and she seemed on the verge of running when Gentarou placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Kengo and XVII are gonna get the Fortress away from the planet in case we can’t stop the thing.  Passed through navigation on my way up and I’ve got the ship keyed in to at least not _fight_ it.”  He smiled at the blue-green Fourze then, “Don’t worry, Fourze’s durable.  Worst comes to worst, you’ll go back home, okay?”

The girl looked about to speak when one of the doors slid open and Nemesis Hopper emerged from it, looking at the scene with a kind of confusion for a moment before simply nodding a little and stepping closer to the group.  Gentarou waved at him a little, smiling his big smile.  The blue-green Fourze stepped behind him a little.

“It’s okay, Ekirh.  We’re all Riders here.”  He looked up at the lot of them and grinned, “Right?  I mean, at least we all really _look_ the part.”

Nadeshiko laughed a little before tilting her head to one side, “No offense to your successor there, Gentarou, but is this the time to be passing the mantle?”

Gentarou made a dismissive gesture and his copy of the belt appeared, “It’s not as versatile as the real thing but I’ll do okay.”

She nodded as if that was good enough for her before gesturing to the “modified” woman and the machine-person “This is Kanda and Nemesis Hopper.”  Nadeshiko held her hand out to Ekirh, “And if you’re the new Fourze, Ekirh, you’re good in my book.”  The two shook hands with Ekirh trying hard to follow along as Nadeshiko went through Gentarou’s involved handshake. 

“Uh…” Ekirh mumbled.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nadeshiko replied, smiling behind her mask, “We all stumble through it the first few times.  If you don’t tell, I won’t.”  She “winked” with the lights of her mask’s eyes and turned to the approaching wave of heat and hate.

Kuuga had noticed them. 

The Fortress rocked as, presumably, XVII began dragging them from orbit.

Kuuga was coming.

The last time they’d had Haruto’s magic and the Zect-Riders’ super-speed.  This time it was just her, Gentarou and a bunch of newbies. 

No such luck this time.

 

 **Godai  
** Everything hurt.

Everything felt far away and even then, it hurt.

The burning, the flames eating at him, trying to reduce him to ash. 

He felt his arms moving, no longer shackled, and hitting someone—harming someone.  The Amadam made a fraction of an effort and someone caught fire.  Even over the smell of burning everything, the nauseating pang of burning fur was impossible to miss.

In his pain-stupor, there was still a part of him glad that Kuuga was only using his hands.  There was something so dreadful about the thought of Kuuga actually kicking someone again.  Last time he’d kicked the monster Decade through dimensional walls, a testament to Tsukasa’s nature.

None of the ones who fought him now had such a nature.

He would have reached out to stop it all but his chest had been split open and he was burning.


	5. Act V - Fear of the Dark

**Gentarou  
** Kuuga frightened him.

How could he not?  The times he’d sat with the man and heard him talk about what was inside of him had chilled him to the bone.  It wasn’t just Godai’s fear, it wasn’t seeing the evidence of how frightful the thing could be, it was the sense of resignation the man had. 

“When it happens, Gentarou,” he’d rasped after a few drinks, when he stopped worrying about encouraging the smiles of the people around him and let his own disappear from his face, “Aim for my waist.  That’s where the Amadam is.  Anything you can do, _everything_ you can do.”  He was almost crying as he leaned on Gentarou and grabbed a handful of his jacket.  “When I go, tear it out of me because I don’t want to remember it.  I don’t want to live with that on my conscience.”

He’d let the man weep on his shoulder because it was a burden and he had to figure that a burden shared was a burden lessened.  At least some.

So many of them flirted with the dark but none of them had it so ready to _consume_ them.

He’d tried to land his drill in the center of the Amadam as he’d promised Godai that night.

He didn’t know if it was the waves of radiation or Kuuga’s hand that hit harder but the combination knocked him out of his corporeality and a surge of radiation sent his energies scattering.

 

 **Nadeshiko  
** Kuuga frightened her.

She didn’t know Godai and before Gentarou brought him up, had never felt any real need to.  She was the Kamen Rider of the stars and the idea of limiting herself to a single world was… bizarre.  If it weren’t for Gentarou, she and XVII would probably have just stayed among the stars.

But then they wouldn’t have met Kengo.  Or the Presenters.  XVII would be a war machine and she would be nothing but the fuel for Foundation X’s plans.

At those times when the Riders all found themselves brought together to combat a foe too great for any single one of them, she was happy to help, riding in as the cavalry and then after, the lot of them would trade stories of the intervening years, meet the newer Riders who were less sure of themselves and generally figure out the weird social dynamics between them.

She’d seen the thing in Godai immediately.  He always hung back and tended to leave quickly if he stayed at all.  He was anxious, skittish and at times obnoxiously deferential.

But the Amadam… she could almost smell its potential and the ways it was subtly altering Godai’s energy pools.  It was a wonder he could stay sane at all with that thing changing the way his energy flowed, taking a straight line and twisting it, inserting new ones where it could, changing his flow from seven to eleven.

Kuuga frightened her, but in his way, Godai scared her more.

But _this_ Kuuga brushed aside her double-rocket punch and a sent a willful surge of Kuuga’s inferno around and inside him blasted her into one wall and sent her skidding down the hall.

 

 **Kanda**  
Kuuga frightened her.

She wasn’t a custom-made death machine like Nemesis Hopper and didn’t have a bunch of neat tricks to pull out like Nadeshiko or the newcomers.  He’d just held out his hand and she’d burnt.  Stupidly, she’d just remembered what her parents told her to do should she ever find herself on fire.  There was no sand on the ship but the rolling had done enough. 

She felt the Kuuga’s massive black hole gaze meeting her freshly-completed red eyes and everything in her wanted to run.  The thing had carved through all of them without much trouble and the white one, Gentarou, had shouted that they should aim for the belt… but then he’d got slapped away like an insect.

To even have a chance of “going for the belt”, she’d have to get close to it.  Have to move closer to those empty, hungry eyes.

Her mother had once told her about the punishment in the next world for those whose souls were not kept sufficiently pure, for those who had allowed themselves to be corrupted.  She’d lost her faith a long time ago and had only wished to find it again only so she could damn the gods for making something like a DaiCrisis empire.  Looking into those horrible eyes, she remembered the story of Zerron, the heart-eater, whose infinite teeth would carve your spirit so many times it would no longer exist as anything but pain.

And then it would digest you forever, screaming in pieces as acids wore your immortal shards away.

Those eyes were Zerron’s mouth, come to devour her, to punish her for turning away from the gods, for spitting on them, for damning them in her heart.

She looked down at the razor-sharp claws she’d been given by her enemies, weapons meant for use against people like her poor, deluded, dead family.

Kanda leapt at Kuuga and felt the sledgehammer of one of his hands send her sprawling to the ground, a scream escaping her fanged mouth as it stepped carelessly atop her, leaving a great burning welt on her back.

 

 **Ekirh**  
Kuuga frightened her.

She was barely more than a child.

She’d never fallen in love.  She’d never seen the Eastern continent.  She’d never had a job that wasn’t tending to the pollinator flock.  She’d never written a book or a poem.  She’d never even had her own _place_.

She wanted to run.  She wanted to run and hide.  Gentarou had said she could manage it.  If she just ran out the way she came in, the Kuuga would devour the metal dragon and she could help with the rebuilding.  With the Fourze Driver, why, she could do anything. 

Except, she realized, live with herself.

She’d followed Gentarou’s lead and taken a leaping kick at the Kuuga, Rocket switch propelling her and the Drill switch to help it do more damage (or so she figured).  A pulse of amazing heat sent her sprawling back and she swapped out the Medical switch at the Driver’s subtle suggestion and tossed a vial of something sparkling at Kanda’s burning back.  The Kuuga didn’t bother intercepting it: a wave of heat vaporized it midair.

She was helpless.

But she wouldn’t run away.

 

 **Nemesis Hopper**  
Kuuga frightened it.

There were massive calculations going on inside it.  Reams of data: the history of the Crisis Empire’s dealings with the Riders, Demon Computer files about Minami Kotaro’s combat patterns, the things he’d heard Godai Yuusuke talk about in that short meeting.

It all failed in the face of the dark-eyed Kuuga.  It was not deactivated at all, it was more alive than it had ever been and that life was death.  Nemesis Hopper had never considered itself a poet but everything in the malevolent precision of Kuuga made it want to draw parallels to things it had only heard of.  Wanted to praise it for the efficiency of its design, to ask Kuuga’s maker where it could obtain joints and musculature of such sublime smoothness.  It was more than a person, Kuuga was an idea and that idea was all-consuming.

Nemesis Hopper worried that he might simply fall into it.

But when the others attacked, it did the same.  There were reservations on some subprocessing level, something about how it was _wrong_ in a way they did not have time to describe before Nemesis Hopper vented coolant every-which-way it could and mimicked the kicks the cosmic ones had made.

The damage Kuuga dealt registered as catastrophic to many of its systems and even the Nemesis Circuit which gave Nemesis Hopper its name, the adaptive power made to fight Riders like Kotaro, could not mitigate the damage the motion of Kuuga’s head did when Nemesis Hopper got close enough.

It had bounced back and fell against the child Ekirh.

Godai had wanted to parley with them.

He had wanted to spare them and they had spat in his face.

Had offered up pieces of himself to convince them to do anything but incur his anger and they had only spurred him on.

Nemesis Hopper was unsure if he wanted to die for that folly but if his ends had not been justified, it followed logically that the crimes he had committed—the razing of cities, the murder of organic and inorganic alike, the forcible takeover of other mechanical minds—had not been justified.  Lacking a cause, it had to agree with Kanda that it deserved permanent deactivation.

But it would not volunteer for it.

 

 **Kuuga  
** They did not fight.

They attacked.  Then they fell.

Kuuga’s hands itched for battle.  For conquest.

The attackers who fell would join Kuuga in the darkness with all the other things it had devoured.

One of the attackers hurled a rope to one which Kuuga had taken.  One Kuuga had marked.

Inside Kuuga, the Amadam spun, venting its frustration that one would attempt to take back one who had fallen into Kuuga’s shadow.  The way the metal one vented cold to try and thwart the fire inside Kuuga—the fire which was Kuuga—caught its attention as paper catches fire near an open flame.

Kuuga hungered.


	6. Act VI - Kamen Riders

**Nemesis Hopper**  
Nemesis Hopper helped Ekirh pull Kanda back from where she had fallen behind Kuuga and with Nadeshiko, they fell back, deeper into the DaiCrisis Fortress.  Nemesis Hopper knew a few places which might (and he stressed _might_ ) be outside of Kuuga’s vision.

Kuuga did not bother to run, nor did it slow.  It just kept stepping forward, leaving piles of ash in its wake.  It did not need to go any faster and, indeed, it did not need to fight them; it had shown that easily enough.

They broke vial after vial from the Medical switch’s stores onto the footprint-shaped burn in Kanda’s back; soon all that was left was a strange mark in the shape of a stylized, thorny face.  Nadeshiko took another of the vials, snapped it in half and tossed it into the air; the glowing liquid inside drifted into the air and turned white, the concentrated cosmic energy of the Medial switch’s medicine gathering up Gentarou’s diffuse energies and binding them together again.

The pair hugged tight before Gentarou grinned at the others, “That’s not the first time she’s done that trick.  Keep that one in mind if you ever get turned into cosmic energy.”  He tried to laugh.

The others were in lower spirits.

Nemesis Hopper looked up at Gentarou, “You have known him longest.  If.  If there is any Godai Yuusuke still inside of Kuuga, can he be brought out?”

Gentarou sighed a little and his smile faded just a little.  “I don’t... I don’t know.”  He was pondering then, looking as if he were debating something.  “Why do you ask?”

“Yeah,” spat Kanda, “Why _do_ you ask?”

Nemesis Hopper searched its networks for the words, “He appealed to me in a way I could not ignore.  The logic of the futility of conquest... I cannot find a way around it.”  It tilted its head downward, “I wish I could.  My existence is a waste if he is correct.  And I do believe he is.”

Kanda growled and then looked shocked that the sound had, indeed, come from her.

Gentarou’s smile returned, “Wait.  You two _talked_?”

Nemesis Hopper nodded.  “We did.  And.”

“You felt a connection?”

Nemesis Hopper nodded again, “I think that is an accurate assessment.”

Gentarou almost did a little dance in place as Nadeshiko clapped her hands on her knees, sighing.  “Well, sure.  Let’s try it.”

The three newcomers looked up at the two energy beings, confused.

Nadeshiko met each of their gazes individually, “But first we’re gonna get something sorted out so we do this _right_.

 

 **Kanda**  
It was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.

“The most powerful force in the universe is cosmic energy,” Gentarou had explained, “And cosmic energy is made of the bonds between people.  Or, y’know.  Friendship.”

But he and Nadeshiko kept pulling giant missiles out of nowhere to put on their arms so maybe they knew a thing or two.

“Don’t worry about that part,” said Nadeshiko, standing by Kanda.  “He loves explaining that.”

“It’s annoying,”

Nadeshiko laughed and shrugged, “And endearing.  But that’s how it goes.” 

Kanda just shook her head.  “So what about this _other_ thing we’re getting ‘sorted out’?”

“Well, here comes the _really_ stupid part:” chuckled Nadeshiko before her voice went entirely serious, “You all need names.”

“We all _have_ names.”

Nadeshiko shook her head and gestured to Gentarou, “He’s Kamen Rider Fourze.  That means a _lot_ on his planet.  The Kamen Riders are some of the greatest heroes on Earth.  Kengo named the Driver Fourze so he’s ‘Kamen Rider Fourze’.  You’re all gonna get Kamen Rider names because that’s a kind of connection between us and we’re going to need that connection if this is going to work.”

Kanda rolled her massive eyes.  She was vaguely sure it didn’t have the desired effect because nobody noticed.  She chalked it up to the eyes themselves being massive and compound instead of small and pupiled like Gentarou’s.

The kid spoke up first, “Um.  Is ‘Nova’ okay?  Kengo talked about them once and I _really_ want to see one and I don’t know if I really want to take Gentarou’s name away from him.”

“If you were _my_ student you’d be getting straight As,” said Gentarou, wiping at his eyes.

The machine spoke up next.  “Kamen Rider Nemesis,” it said quietly.  “I cannot run from what I have done or what I am.  And I will help fight this Kuuga.”

All eyes turned to Kanda who just shrugged. 

“One of _you_ pick a name.  I don’t... this is stupid.”

Ekirh shrugged a little and said, “Howl?  The... the sound you make when you charge is.  It’s pretty scary.  But cool.”

Something about the kid made it hard to be dismissive there.  She shrugged, “Howl, then.”

Gentarou nodded decisively, “Then this is gonna work _great_!”

Kanda was far from certain that this was the case.

 

 **Gentarou**  
Kuuga was two doors down when they emerged; the ship behind him had, because of the heat shimmer or smoke or some cruel quality of Kuuga’s nature, simply gone black.  Nothing in the Fortress escaped Kuuga’s darkness.

Gentarou felt his bravery being drawn into the Ultimate Darkness’ horrid gravity along with light and the future of this ship, nevermind the planet below.

The five of them stood in a line in front of Kuuga, who raised his hand.

“Let’s go!” shouted Gentarou and he, Nadeshiko and Ekirh slapped on their belts.  Nemesis and Kanda dropped into combat stances as the Drivers counted down their three-two-one to the transformation.

“Just like you said, Nemesis!” said Nova as her jetpack flared and sent her a few feet into the air and Nemesis slid under her to move to tackle Kuuga.  He grasped the robot’s arms as Nemesis vented its icy counter to Kuuga’s heat as Nova landed behind Kuuga, swapping into Magnet States again and blasting the back of Kuuga’s head with the shoulder cannons and everything else with the Freeze switches on one leg to try and counter some of the flame and the Pen switch on the other to mummify its legs—what Fourze assured her was the most dangerous part of Kuuga—in the unyielding “ink”.

Kamen Rider Howl pounced on top of Kuuga, sliding between Nemesis and Kuuga’s arms to stab her diamond-hard claws into the surface of the Amadam.  She felt its electric resistance rocket up her arms only to diffuse somewhere in her forearms.  Kuuga realized what she was doing and tried to break free from Nemesis’ grip.  Gentarou grabbed hold of his right arm and Nadeshiko the left.

Kuuga was almost trapped.  Kuuga tried to move his feet but Nova’s combination of the Pen and Freeze switches limited their movement with the sturdy carbon of the “ink” even as the freeze slowed the carbon’s reduction to ash.

It was a good plan.  They’d become a team and that team was a bond between them and all the other Riders and that meant it was going to—

 

 **Nadeshiko  
** Kuuga sent all of them flying with a sound that was... impossible.  It was like Nokigoe’s scream in that it near shredded herself and Gentarou (who was a slower learner at reconstituting his energy form than she had been), yet stronger, filled with and transmitting more pain.

It _hurt_ to be Kuuga.  She could see it.

Its mouthplate was open and there was nothing inside, just a screaming, burning darkness.  If Godai was still in there, he was so far gone now.  Its mouth kept folding open like some mandibled animal panting with effort.  Except this was no effort for Kuuga, she could tell.  Frustration, yes, but not effort.

Kuuga let out a low, frustrated sound like grinding metal.

Then the fists moved. 

Nadeshiko and Gentarou were knocked away first but every time Kuuga tried to bring its burning fists down on the newly-christened Howl, Nemesis blasted its face with a burst of frost and deflected the fists. 

Gentarou and Nadeshiko nodded at one another and rocketed back behind Kuuga as Nadeshiko tossed up a couple switches.  Nadeshiko swapped in the Rocket Drill switch, Gentarou shifted Cosmic and Nova flared a bright orange as she switched from Magnet States to Rocket States.  There was a smell of burning fuel as the three of them leapt toward Kuuga’s back.

Nadeshiko could have laughed when she realized that Gentarou had already given the attack a name, shouting “Cosmic Rider Scramble!” just before they all slammed hard into Kuuga.  Nadeshiko could feel its attention wavering from the other two Riders attacking its Amadam and flexed its legs, shattering the impossibly-hard carbon to mule-kick the three of them.

Not quite the plan, Nadeshiko had to admit, but as the three of them were—

 

 **Kamen Rider Nova**  
She could _feel_ the kick as it hit Fourze.  It wasn’t a question of empathy, it was more that the shockwave of something making that much of an impact made the whole corridor quake.  She turned to see where he landed

Only he didn’t land.  The impact seemed to erase him.

She heard Nadeshiko scream his name but there wasn’t time.  They’d made the plan.  Despite her protestations, he’d trusted it to her.  “It’s your world, Ekirh,” he’d said with his big, goofy smile, “down there, you’ve got your friends and your family and take it from me, being close to that kind of cosmic energy… that makes some _magic_ happen.”

He’d trusted her so she’d.

She’d stand up against the Kuuga.  The Ultimate Darkness.

Her hands were shaking as she took up the Fusion switch and turned it on.  It was supposed to connect all the users of the cosmic Drivers and if Gentarou wasn’t there, that would mean he was—

 

 **Kamen Rider Nemesis  
** The shining Nova, all glowing metallic blue-green and trailing some kind of glittering energy rocketed over Kuuga’s head to grab onto Nemesis’ back. 

“Time to move,” it said to Howl, who rolled out of the way, skittering around Kuuga as Nemesis wrapped its metal arms around the burning beast, venting all the ice it could but still feeling its manifolds starting to heat up.  It hoped it wouldn’t take long.

It felt Nova’s fingers touching the sides of its head and there was a strange feeling of the world falling away around it and for the first time since it was conscious, it was without a body.  Everything around it was filled with that same burning dark and it felt Ekirh’s hand warm inside its own.  Beside Ekirh, he only saw Nadeshiko.  It was about to ask but it could see Nadeshiko biting her lip and setting her jaw.

They had lost one.  One connection to Godai Yuusuke.  One source of the energy which, it was hoped, could counter the burning hunger of Kuuga.

There was no other choice.  Even stranded in space, Kuuga would only be confined for so long before its dread hunger and purpose would awaken again.

Hand-in-hand, the three of them stepped into the burning dark, toward the tiny, burning figure which Nemesis imagined to be what remained of Godai Yuusuke’s heart.

 

 **Kamen Rider Howl  
** Kanda didn’t know whatever was inside Kuuga.  Didn’t care to, truth to tell.  Anything with something like that inside themselves that didn’t kill themselves or, barring that, find a way to just lock themselves away forever was beneath her contempt.  She was sure the others could come up with reasoning but if this was not literally Zerron, the heart-eater, it was close enough to it.

She only wished Nemesis had hugged it from behind or something so she could easier get at its core. 

In the meanwhile, though, her job was to keep the monster busy.  And that meant hurting this _thing_ , this stupid man with too much power who’d fallen into it and let it consume him.

She leapt out of the way of another one of the kicks which had _erased_ Nadeshiko’s Fourze and grabbed the leg, jamming her claws into the meat of it and receiving a horrible, screaming, scalding pain as flame vented out of the wound instead of blood.  She kept her grip all the same and was about to start feeling proud of herself for so incapacitating the thing had the other leg not swung up in an acrobatic move, throwing off Nemesis and the glittering Nova, the flaming sole of Kuuga’s foot just barely missing her. 

“Well, that wasn’t in the plan…” muttered Kamen Rider Howl as she dropped into the fighting stance the DaiCrisis had encoded in her physical memory when the heart-eater turned its empty gaze to her and the mouth on its faceplate unfolded and opened and howled its frustration and hunger.  Howl returned the sound with a scream of hate and frustration and violation and loss.

They met each other in midair, thunderclap fists against newly-christened ceramic chitin and claws digging into the flaming meat of the Ultimate Darkness’ carapace.

 

 **Godai**  
Kuuga was fighting.  He couldn’t tell if it was the end of the world or only of the fortress and he could feel the weight of failure in the burning pain in his chest.  Kuuga reached its hand into him and just as he knew where Kuuga’s heart was, it knew also where his was and it was burning him from the inside out.

He tried to tell himself that he’d tried.  He’d tried longer than anyone could have expected him to and he hadn’t gone to sleep because they’d needed him.  The only thing he wanted was more smiles even if his own had become poison to him and he always had to stand between and it hurt.

He hoped Gentarou was wrong and that there wasn’t a heaven or a cosmic plane because then he could just stop and there would be

His eyes shot open at the feel of a metal hand on his shoulder and the burning subsided.

“Nemesis Hopper?” he whispered as the gunmetal mechanical man, limned in light, nodded and the other two, Nadeshiko and a green-skinned girl with five pink eyes and leaves for hair, emerged from the dark, the flames and the sound of burning dimming in their presence.

He could see in their eyes that something had happened.

“How—?” he whispered.

“Kamen Rider Nemesis,” the machine-man corrected him gently.  “The Gentarou said that you and I might be connected and…”

Godai let out a snort, cutting Nemesis off.  The snort became a laugh which threatened to become weeping and he felt Nadeshiko wrap her arm around him as he sobbed.

 

 **Kuuga**  
It felt something stirring inside itself as it swatted the green thing away. 

The thing bounced off a wall, onto the ceiling and then came again.  Flames did not stop it.  Kuuga had to maintain an effort to keep its chitin burning as it delved into the joints of the green thing to find something flammable.  Kuuga was pleased that it put up such a fight.  Kuuga was pleased that it could feel its own weakness weeping somewhere deep inside itself, ready to fall away.

Kuuga waited for the green thing to leap at it again and when it did, Kuuga caught the green thing’s throat.  It pulled back its fist and the green thing hissed something and kicked.

Kuuga jerked in place.

 

 **Kamen Rider Howl**  
“I don’t breathe through my head anymore,” she hissed as she brought her diamond-hard foot down on the sphere contained in Kuuga’s belt.  There was a sound like the world cracking and the blackness flickered.

The black, clawed hands weren’t themselves for a moment and Kanda kicked again.  And again.

Underneath it all, Kuuga wasn’t much.  A head shorter than its armoured form had been, something not unlike her own people, only without horns and tiny, rounded ears.  She scoffed and slapped its hand away.

Kuuga couldn’t hurt her anymore and the tiny thing seemed to know it.  It let out a tiny howl, a cry of frustration from a tiny, stupid thing and she took no small pleasure in slapping it down to the ground, placing her foot on its back, to keep an eye on it lest it try to squirm away or reawaken its damaged power.

Watching it scramble, she realized how easy it would be.  How simple to just push her foot down and end this Kuuga’s threat.  Nobody would blame her; at least nobody who really _mattered_ but.

But she’d been something small and unthreatening and only _potentially_ dangerous before.  That was why the Empire had not made her into another Chap-soldier but chose instead to turn her guerilla zeal into something they could use for their own ends. 

She hated it.  She hated them.

She hated that she couldn’t justify crushing something so weak just because she had become so strong.

It was foolish to feel like she had anything in common with the DaiCrisis.  But underneath the thrashing, she’d been assured there was someone worth knowing.  Right now, Kuuga had no power and she had all of it and that changed her calculus.

Kanda was thankful when the creature, presumably the “Godai”, jerked under her foot and was suddenly still.

 

 **Ekirh**  
They were all weeping, even Nemesis, who she didn’t think had anything in it to facilitate weeping.

She couldn’t feel Gentarou and much as she kept expecting him to appear out of nowhere in the Fusion, it was still just her and Nadeshiko, the pair of them latched onto the energy of Nemesis’ connection to the wan figure of Godai.

Ekirh didn’t know why Godai was weeping.  Or why Nemesis was, either.

But she could feel their tears turning massive as they rolled down their faces and the sound of hissing all around them as the tears left streaks of bright, soothing light in the burning darkness, carving away the hunger until they all seemed to stand on a shore somewhere inside of Godai.  An unfamiliar man in a brown coat stood at the head of a staggeringly large crowd of people not far off from them and when Godai looked up he took a hesitant step towards them.

Nadeshiko pulled Nemesis and Ekirh with them and she wondered who the man was and why Godai hugged him so desperately.

There were words then but she did her best not to listen.  Things whispered that weren’t for her ears.  Adult things.

The unfamiliar man smiled and, awkwardly, placed a kiss on Godai’s cheek.  “It’s alright, Godai Yuusuke,” he murmured quietly.  “We just wanted to say ‘hello’ while the cosmic energy window was open.” 

There was a commotion near the back and Ichijou smiled and laughed a little, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.  “Oh, and we also wanted to return _this_ to you.”

“Hey, guys!  I just got kicked by the Ultimate Darkness!  How _awesome_ was that?”

Nadeshiko let out a high-pitched squeal as Gentarou burst out of the crowd and leapt onto her, clasping his hand to hers and Ekirh’s.

Godai looked over at Gentarou. 

Gentarou flashed the man one of his smiles and held out his hand like a fist, only with the thumb sticking out.  Apparently that was some kind of joke because Godai almost started laughing again.  Or crying.  It was hard to tell.

Godai and the man embraced again and for a moment, Ekirh wondered if Godai was going to go with them to… to wherever it was they’d all come from.

She watched Godai and the man embrace tightly before Godai took a step back and suddenly a layer of formality went up between them, the two of them smiling like some old joke.  Godai bowed some; the man and the crowed returned the gesture in earnest.

There was a sickening jerking sensation and suddenly Gentarou was helping her to her feet.  She looked around at the battered, burnt and blackened corridor, confused and wondering if they were, indeed back in reality.  The strange shore had felt so _real_ but now…

Behind them, Kanda let out a frustrated sigh, “So, what now?  Do I let him up or what?”


	7. Epilogue

**Kengo  
** The repairs were going about as well as could be expected.  The materials were comparatively primitive but between the six Riders and the survivors of the DaiCrisis attack, there were at least places for the survivors to live and good food for them to eat.  They did most of their agriculture underground, after all.  He supposed it _would_ seem a bit ghoulish if the plant-people ate lots of other vegetables instead of fungi but he was a mammal and had eaten more than his share of other mammals, so perhaps it wouldn’t have been quite so frightful.

You did your best to shut down most of your moral judgments when you did jobs for the Presenters but Kengo was a physicist, not an anthropologist so he felt okay with not being as great at it as he probably could have been.

The Space Sheriffs had sent a couple representatives to keep an eye on the planet.  “Two of our best,” Commander Mimi Qom had promised, “nothing less for one of Captain Daisuke’s friends.”  The representatives had agreed to wear the image-projectors which would help them blend in with the people of the planet who were, it seemed, in the midst of an existential crisis.  But, then, they’d just weathered an attempted alien invasion; and only because _other_ aliens had intervened.

The appearance of Kamen Rider Nova had gone a long way to helping calm everyone down.  Seeing one of their own in the costume raised a lot of concerns (what if she was part of the invasion, what if she was a spy, what if, what if, what if) but it also put a more relatable face to the strangeness.  Kamen Rider Howl remained little more than a rumour among certain circles who thought to use the chaos to springboard criminal enterprises like water-hoarding or stealing medical supplies, to say nothing of the DaiCrisis troops and their monstrous commanders who sought to improve their standing with their Empress by attempting to secure territory near where they had landed when abandoning the Fortress.

They’d offered Kanda a lift back home.  She just asked for an image-projector and to know where she could find a job.  She didn’t talk much about her homeworld.  Kengo wanted to press her about it but even with all the heavy modifications the DaiCrisis Empire had made to her face, he could see the subject was a painful one.  He gave her an image-projector so she could blend in and let her go about her way.

It was a big world and there were only the two Riders and the two representatives of the Space Sheriffs but they seemed to have ample downtime; without any word of reinforcements, the Crisis people who elected to stay as would-be terrorist cells had only so long they could operate before they joined much of their brethren at the Galactic Union Patrol lockup. 

Kamen Rider Nemesis (it felt wrong to Kengo to refer to him by his old name) had opted to surrender itself (Kengo kept asking after a gender or something to call it other than the impersonal, dehumanized ‘it’; apparently that was how Nemesis thought of itself) to the Sheriffs, pleading guilty to a list of crimes as a part of the DaiCrisis Empire which could comfortably fill a small library.  Kengo didn’t hold out much hope for it getting a sentence which ended any time soon, no matter the testimony of the Presenters’ allies or of Angrov’s young Rider.  Kanda’s testimony had been, perhaps, less than helpful to the machine’s case but Kengo had to admit she was correct: no matter that he had changed, it was more important that justice be served.

Gentarou was filled with stories about what he’d seen and Kengo was planning to put them down for posterity.  He would likely never show anyone but the Presenters, as Earth was already filled with enough mysteries and the word of a creature who shared origins with at least a handful of the monsters which had attacked the planet over the past decades would certainly not go unquestioned.  Especially given how many frankly miraculous beings had attempted to steal the hearts, minds and souls of Earth under such guises before.

He and Nadeshiko were spending more time alone together and Nadeshiko was, at times, a bit more withdrawn.  Kengo wondered if perhaps the brush with Gentarou’s death had stirred something in her immortal heart, some worry or sense of fragility.  Mostly, though, when she wasn’t arguing with the construction fore, she was bringing new samples up to XVII, who accepted them with grace.

The DaiCrisis Fortress was impounded.  There was talk of selling it but it was decided to strip it down for parts.  The Empire expressed some anger at this but as the invasion was a massive violation of intergalactic law, the matter was for greater presences than an employee of the Presenters, who were largely uninterested in matters of politics except as they determined a species’ readiness to ascend to a superluminal spacefaring society.

And Godai Yuusuke?

Kengo tapped at the report he was filling out for the Presenters and looked up to the hill where Godai was sitting, staring out at the unfamiliar sunset that coloured the sky bright blue and purple and electric yellow, his massive traveler’s pack laying on the ground beside him.

He deleted the line about Godai, saved a draft of the report, and turned around to walk back to the apartment he had near the Mayor’s house, an honour given to the representative from the stars and also a way to keep him far away from impressionable youth.  His “additions” to the curriculum were scrutinized much harder now and leaving bits of chaos throughout Angrov’s scientific community.  It would have been smarter to just hold his tongue, but even if he wasn’t sure they were ready for the Presenters to seed a Core Child just yet or to connect them with a Core Switch, they could be within Ekirh’s lifetime.

He wouldn’t be around for all of it, but once the most necessary construction was finished, he’d be on his way back to Earth, secure in the knowledge that Angrov was safe and on its way to something better.

 

 **Godai  
** Godai had made a deal with Kanda the previous week.

She’d watch him for signs that he wasn’t going to let the Ultimate Darkness take him again if he’d show her a thing or two about a wanderer’s life.  They’d shared a few stories about things he’d seen and done on Earth, things unrelated to Kuuga.  Apparently she’d been mostly a city girl and hadn’t gone out to try those sorts of things before.  She’d lucked into guerilla resistance movement when Nemesis Hopper and the DaiCrisis came to her world which meant she got to live, but.

He wished any of the other Riders he knew could be there to help her out.  To offer better advice.

He wished he was better at reaching out because she needed a friend and the best she could find was someone who’d tried to kill her a scant few months before.

“I just need to… to find _something_ ,” she’d said one night on the other side of the dying campfire, “I don’t know how to feel _connected_ anymore.  They _took_ that and…”

Godai had just nodded.  There was nothing to say after that “and”, only feelings of inarticulate frustration and rage which words could not touch.

Tonight, they were headed off on an adventure.  They’d teach each other some of the skills they’d learned.  They’d put on their image projectors and blend into crowds and never be noticed by anyone and learn to feel normal again.

She’d saved his life, been one of the five who held him back from going as bad as he knew he could, and she needed him.

And Godai needed to wander.

And there was a whole new world for them to wander on.

And whatever that “something” was, well, he’d never found it but the end of his fight on the Fortress reminded him that he’d found a lot of other things along the way which were more than worthwhile.

If that was enough for him, he hoped that it might be enough for Kanda as well.


End file.
